Dessie, my girlfriend, turned to me today and excitedly showed me a picture of a games console on her phone. “That’s what I had growing up,” she said, pointing to a picture of a SNES, the ugly American one. It was a nice but unremarkable moment. Then she added: “Except mine was black.” Black? I didn’t remember a black one so I Googled it. And I Googled it and I Googled it but I couldn’t find the machine she remembered.
Did she mean a Mega Drive? I brought up some pictures of it. “No,” she said. “But it has a circle like that,” and she pointed to the top of the machine. Maybe she meant a Saturn? “No,” she said. “But I like the name. It’s because Saturn has discs and the console uses discs right?” Now I don’t want to make myself out to sound stupid but that is the first time anyone ever pointed that out to me.
What could this damned machine be? She was adamant it had cartridges. At my wit’s end (it doesn’t take long to get there as you can probably now appreciate) I decided to Google something a little more direct. ‘Bulgarian 90s game console black,’ I wrote, and like a beam of sun breaking through the clouds there it was. “That’s it!” she exclaimed. We had found it, the sublimely named Terminator 2 console made by Ending-Man.
Her eyes lit up as the memories came flooding back in but I looked at it for the first time. I had never seen this machine before, never even so much as heard it talked about. As far as I was concerned, the Terminator 2 had never existed except for on film – and with a name like that I think I’d remember it. But how can this be? Well, it has a lot to do with where she grew up: Bulgaria.